You can register for the September 2009 Meeting now.

The meeting will take place at Henning Software's location in Hudson OH in Suite 211 located at 102 First Street.

Agenda

From 5:30pm to 6pm we'll just be having open discussion and networking.  We'll also figure out the evening's agenda and post it on the whiteboard, including who's going to be presenting and what Open Spaces topics people are interested in.

At 6pm we'll have anyone who wishes to give a lightning talk do so.  These should be 5 to 10 minutes in length and related to software craftsmanship.  Presentations need not be Powerpoint lectures - if you want to run through a quick code kata or demonstrate a design pattern you like or a refactoring technique, these are all fine things as well.

At about 630pm we'll break for pizza and do Open Spaces for 30 minutes or so.  Our space should accomodate 2 or 3 different "spaces" for such discussion.

At about 7pm we'll do some hands-on exercises.  Exactly what we'll work on will be left up to the consensus of the group, but certainly might include the Bowling Game or Prime Factors kata, or perhaps a Project Euler problem.

At 8pm or so we'll adjourn the meeting and anyone wishing to continue discussing software craftsmanship may do so at a nearby restaurant/bar which we'll choose as we wrap up the meeting.

Notes from First/Previous Meeting

At the first meeting in August 2009, we brainstormed some ideas for future meetings.  Here are some of the things we want to try and keep in mind at the September meeting and going forward:

1. Suggestion to keep lightning talks short and have many small presentations
2. Topic suggestion: Tools used every day at work.  Some concern that these must be tied to software craftsmanship.
3. Topic suggestion: How core principles of software development can be applied to everyday work.
4. Take a block of code that works well and discuss it with the group.  Get feedback from others, perhaps have others code the same problem (before showing the block of code you came up with) and compare approaches.
5. Keep meetings as hands-on as can be.
6. Hands-On: How to eliminate dependencies
7. Hands-On: How to get things under test
8. Suggestion to definitely use pairing at keyboards, and switching up partners, as a away to facilitate knowledge transfer.
9. Suggestion: Have some kind of code competition.
10. Topic suggestion: Design Patterns and real world usage
11. Topic: How our understanding of patterns evolves from ignorance to awareness to wanting to use it everywhere to seeing where appropriate.
12. Topic / Overall suggestion: Simplicity.  Keep software, and our meetings, as simple as possible to get the job done.

That's a good list and should easily guide us through the rest of 2009's meetings.